Mood:
quizzicalTopic: aust govt
Picture (top) The author in office shirt and tie (centre) listens to Karenne Jurd, then national Director of The Wilderness Society outside NSW Parliament around 1994. (Bottom). $5000 banner opposite the Opera House erected by the author, others like Fiona McCrossin, Jules McMahon etc in 1994, with Milo Dunphy, Tricia Caswell, and this writer on a unity ticket to save native forests here rapdily being converted to dry schlerophyll regrowth.
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Posted recently on this string in New Matilda here:
http://newmatilda.com/2010/01/27/black-property-rights-not-under-liberal-government#comment-20177
A lesson from history:
Karenne Jurd was national director of TWS in 1994 when a vote of no confidence was passed against her. I was at that national meeting as embattled NSW campaign coordinator for TWS. KJ didn’t like me much and indeed suggested she would "smash me" for some cultural infraction or other. But what people don’t recall is that PM Keating put the skids on her in The Bulletin conservative press because she attempted to save wet forest types across Australia. Not piecemeal. KJ had Judy Clark now Adjani socio economic analysis "homework" and the guts to take on the ALP cronies.
She had some weaknesses professionally but her national real politik analysis was right. Since then the logging industry has created a wildfire bonfire replacing wet with dry schlerophyll landscapes (an audit anyone?)… and they know it deep in their whispering heart. So why go to this? Because Alec Marr with similar broad uncompromising agenda in Tasmania and nationally also knows the truth of the ALP cynicism. Replacing him won’t change that reality. Alec no doubt pushed the button on Wild Rivers deal in Cape York against the Howard/Pearson alliance because he is so independent of both major parties.
The irony is that the main push against KJ came from the TWS Tas ‘boys’ including Alec. But they are all working in the same direction. The real opponents are the loggers and miner corporations and their govt toadies. Always have been, always will be. Back then the Tas TWS were also very fiesty and indy of the national body.
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By the way Malcolm Turnbull was sniffing around TWS for cooperative project in the late 80ies - time that was out in national affairs.
We have written elsewhere that TWS really ought to consider a new name The Ecology Society, because of Indigenous sensitivities about 'wild' suggesting the toxic policy of terra nullius, which has never been the intent of the modern green movement. Indeed we have archived alot of our files and analysis under this term "ecology action" for seven years now. Here is the unrelated forerunner in Sydney from August 1975 which might be about the time TWS was first formed after the Lake Peddar debacle:
